Category: Alumni

Today we feature another project from the MA Interaction Design show: “Sustainable Practices and 3D Printing”, by Eric Schneider, who proposes turning plastic waste into filament for 3D printers:

My project is about supporting sustainability in a homeless community in Austin, Texas, and re-establishing the realities around 3D printing- seeing it not as replication, but as creating connections and allowing scavenging and recycling. The community I engage with is very much into sustainability, they mow the lawn with rabbits, which fertilise the lawn with their droppings, and when they are done with the rabbits, they kill them and eat them. They have a garden where they grow luffa plants which they open up, dry and use as a sponge to bathe. So I took this idea of sustainability within the community, and then I created a process where plastic waste has been ground down, melted and extruded, using workout machines to grind down the plastics. It creates a full circle sustainable system where plastic is consumed and then re-used within the community. I envisioned two products that they could potentially make in this way: one was a water collection system, where the connections between the pipes are 3D printed, so pipes that wouldn’t normally fit, do fit now. The other one was the base of a shoe. Continue reading “MA Interaction Design show: Eric Schneider- “Sustainable practices and 3D printing””

It’s time for another of our interviews from the MA Interaction Design graduation show! Today we talk with Cameron Grace Poole about her project “Hello Lesbian”:

My project is a design research project about lesbians in online dating. I had an interest in feminism, which explores marginal perspectives in technologies; there hasn’t been a lot of work done in the field on this topic, and I thought dating technology would be interesting, because so many people use it these days. So that’s how it started; my display is a live research wall, so it’s still very much a research project, and my outcomes aren’t really concrete designs, but rather proposals for possible dating technologies that are different from what exists today. Continue reading “MA Interaction Design show- Cameron Poole: “Hello Lesbian””

Today we hear about another one of the projects from the MA Interaction Design show of last week. “Graphene Can…” was developed by Samantha Miller and Jon Flint. We managed to catch Jon at the show and talk to him:

This project looks at future implications of Graphene. We started by talking to scientists and visiting laboratories where they are currently using the material. Then we decided to talk to different members of society that have some relation to materials, whether they’re intangible materials or materials they work with. We’ve interviewed about 12 different people, from tattoo artists to Meccano enthusiasts, and we’ve asked them what they would use this material for, given its properties. Continue reading “MA Interaction Design show- “Graphene Can…””

It’s time to get into the details of another graduation project from the MA Interaction Design show: “Botanic Gene” by Cristina Munoz.

What is your project about, in a nutshell?

I created a service where the DNA of a person or an animal is inserted into a plant. Here is how it works: you order a plant online, then you spit in the kit you receive and you send it back to the lab; the lab puts your DNA in a gun and send a cell culture of the plant you chose. As soon the package arrives to your house, you are able to shoot the DNA into the plant. Mainly, the service wants to engage people with science at home. The idea is to create different scenarios that reflect on how science is capable of influencing our everyday lives. there is a lot currently happening with life-hacking and the Do-It-Yourself movement, and that is totally fine, it needs to happen, but we need to question what we are bringing into our lives. Just by bringing something like this into the mundane, the idea is to imagine a future that is not dystopian, just a possibility of how things can be. Continue reading “MA Interaction Design show- Cristina Munoz: “Botanic Gene””